Mgt713: Reflection Paper - Stress Is Positive or Negative?

Ling Li(Lydia)

MGT713

Professor Hassey

9/21/2015

                          Reflection Paper 1: stress is positive or negative?

        For today’s society, due to the fiercely competitive occupation, people have to face many kinds of problems in their lives; this can make them to have deep stress in their lives, such as anxiety, tension and conflict etc., so stress is part of our lives. After read chapter 2, I think there are two different stresses: negative and positive stress. In my word, negative stress is a bad stress for people, it makes people feel that they cannot achieve their goal or they are not assertive people and so on. However, positive stress can encourage people to finish their tasks at their peak level and make them to be fulfilled; positive stress can also offer opportunities for people, to gain things. I will talk about the differences between them and give you some examples show how they impact people.

        Stress is a very common problem in our society, everyone faces it at everywhere, like workshops, schools and families etc. When we mentioned the word “stress”, most of us think that it is a negative terms. However, not all of them are negative, there is also positive stress that you can get achievement from it, such as buying a new home, having a baby or having a vacation etc. These activities make us feel excited and improve our performance. For example, having a baby can be an excited and challenging thing, but also make people to feel a lot of stress, like financial situation, new role and physical changing etc. However, you will be most willing to bear all of this, because you love the baby who will coming to the world later, because you want to see the baby who will be your family member. You will be perfectly happy to have this baby, even though you are under too much pressure. Positive stress happened is not just in our personnel lives, it also emerged in an organization. For example, great performance in an organization is a consequence of organization stress. Why I said it is a stress. Because when you want to get your boss’s attention, and get promotion in your organization, you have to have a perfect performance and show your talent to your leader. This can make you have a great pressure to do your work, because you are scared of doing wrong or make mistakes. However, this stress also can make you achieve your goal and make a confidence in your organization. Therefore, it is said to be positive stress that can encourage you to be a hard working person.

        Even though, we can obtain good experience by positive stress, we have to deal with negative stress most of our times. Negative stress is like a distress for us; we try to avoid it by perform well, but it is useless. Negative stress occurs when our body cannot feel relaxed, like headache, trembling, depression etc. There are also two types of negative stress, one is in our personnel life, such as the death of a spouse or closed family members, divorcing, conflict in interpersonal relationships etc.; another type is in an organization, such as conflict with colleagues or supervisors, excessive job demands, lack of training etc. I will give two example respectively to show why I think it is negative stress. First, the negative stress in our personnel lives, like death of family members. This matter will affect bad impact to your physical situation, like eating less, insomnia, weakness etc. More seriously, it will cause psychological problems like anxiety, panic, depression and obsessive-compulsive etc. And in general, people have to find methods to cope with this situation. For example, you can talk with your intimate friends; you can take a swim in the pool and walks with your spouse to relieve your pain. For the negative stress in an organization, I prefer to give an example about having conflict with other members.  All we know that major disagreements, or heated arguments can cause conflict with other members in an organization, it will result in unhappiness and inefficiency on your work. This is long time stress, because you have to work with your colleagues several years, even lifetime until one of you retire. As a result, we have to figure out how to get along with co-workers, such as having a communication or discussing your opinions and so on.